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After three years of intense focus on therapy and personal growth, I'm finally hitting the keys again and will be jumping into NaNoWriMo on November 1st, 2016. Stay tuned for updates!

Monday, 17 March 2014

A MOVABLE FEAST - Ernest Hemingway

Okay, so I’ve been neglecting this blog for a bit and
focusing my attentions on other projects, which was wrong and I’m sorry.

Things have been pretty intense for me over the past
while (you can read more about that at www.myyearwithoutsex.ca)
and I have had trouble making myself sit down to write. In fact, I have barely been writing at all
(even my other projects are suffering).
This thing that I love to do so much, I have just been avoiding. I guess we all go through periods like this,
but I think I have been mildly self-sabotaging.
I focused on getting my writing going last year and it started to
succeed, so what do I do, I stop.
Typical me. I’m trying to move
past that.

Anyhoo, that’s not the point of this post, but it is a
bit of an explanation. The point is: I’m
back. And I just finished reading A Movable Feast by Ernest
Hemingway. This is a great place at
which to jump back in because Hemingway is my FAVOURITE authour. I’ve mentioned this in other posts, but I
realize now that I have failed to actually write about Hemingway and his
influences on my writing in any real way in this blog. Crazy pants!

A Movable Feast
is Hemingway’s account of his early years in Paris living in poverty with his
first wife Hadley and the various artists with which he would associate (you
may have heard of a few: Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ezra Pound… and a few others – really, just a bunch of nobodys – ha!). It is an incredible glimpse into what life
was like for these incredible icons in literature (“icons” isn’t the right word
and according to Hemingway, I should keep searching until I find the mot juste, but for the sake of expediency,
I’m going with it) before they were icons.
Hemingway worked on this novel for decades and it was his first book to
be published posthumously.

Like all works of Hemingway, A Movable Feast leaves you speechless and feeling like you’ve been
punched in heart. It makes you yearn to
be part of that generation in that place and time. It inspires a feeling of artists on the cusp
of greatness seeking an idea that is just beyond their grasp. It is magical. But what is most poignant is that though you
wish you could be a part of that time, it draws attention to the fact that at
that time, they were just normal people.
Yes, many looked up to and respected each other’s successes, but they
were all just beginning (Hemingway has yet to write a novel and F. Scott
Fitzgerald was having no success selling The
Great Gatsby). They fostered that
idea and made it what it was. It was not
a singular occurrence of being in time.
They made that time what it was by being there. That means it is replicable.

I’m not saying we all need to move to Paris and become bohemian
writers, poets and artists. I’m saying
that if you look, you will find those people around you. You need to foster the artistic dynamism that
you seek. The idea of Paris in the 20s
is temporal – the essence is movable. This
perfect storm of inspiration can strike anywhere. You just need to be aware. I was thinking earlier today that I spent a
week in Paris a couple years ago hoping to snatch up a bit of the lingering
essence of what life was like in Hemingway’s time, but I have found more of
that essence in the past week working in Kingston Ontario that I ever did in
Paris. Paris in the 20s was a way of
life. It wasn’t the location. It was what you were willing to sacrifice for
your art and the ability to surround yourself with those of a like philosophy.

Hemingway also talks about his writing and his process,
which to someone who is a super fan, this is the most influential part of the
book. It inspires you to just do
it. He also talks about his struggles
when writing: how he would get annoyed when interrupted, how many times he
would spend a day writing a single paragraph, how he never believed he could
actually accomplish the monumental task of writing a novel (‘cause it is a
monumental task – and those who are familiar with Hemingway know that his
novels aren’t Stephen King 1000 page monsters, they usually sit between 200-300
pages), and how when he lost his way, he would go back and scrap everything
until he found the last true sentence he wrote and pick-up from there. That was his deal – he always wrote what was
true. This does not mean that all his
novels were autobiographical or that he had to experience similar events first
hand, it just means he always examined his work based on what knew to be true
at the time. And yes, there is an
autobiographical element within many of his novels (be it characters or
situations), but that’s because those were areas he felt comfortable writing
about but the overarching story was fiction.
I feel the same can be said for much of my body of work, which is likely
why I relate so closely to Hemingway and his style.

So, I’ve been attempting to adopt what I’m calling
Hemingway-isms into my life. Today, this
included buying the fixings for a charcuterie lunch with some nice white wine
for dinner (because this will last me a couple days) and that way I’m not
spending my money at expensive restaurants while on the road and can save to
spend more time on my writing. (Also, I
really like charcuterie!) It also means:
no more TV, committing to my writing, and doing things that help my writing
when I’m not actually writing (like taking long walks, reading or putting myself
in new situations). So that’s the new
goal. I’m going to Hemingway
myself. I’ve already found my prose
evolving from the descriptive style Hemingway uses.

Here is a little random writing sample from dinner the
other night where I applied some of the techniques I’ve been learning (I also
hope to complete a novel soon):

It was a time when
credit came in the form of small plastic cards and notebooks were more widely
known as portable computers than a collection of bound blank pages. Though I
still carried the paper book in my purse, my more fervent writing was completed
on my SmartPhone, although the auto-correct was still a far cry from what I
would define as “smart”. Typing was
speedier than writing by hand, so I could jot notes much faster.

I sat in a sushi
bar on the main street in Kingston, reading Hemingway while slowly enjoying
dinner before I went into The Grand to call a show. I sat at the front of the restaurant by the
window. It was late winter in Canada, so
the location was verging on cold by the end of the meal, but I enjoyed seeing
the people walk past and the sun charting its course through the sky. I ate my meal deliberately and focused on the
flavours it presented. Before leaving my
hotel, I had discovered that my expenditures had gone off the rails in the past
few months and I needed to scale back.
The sushi in town was expensive, so this would likely be the last time I
had some before returning to Toronto.

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Welcome to Art Thief!

After a few failed attempts at creating "themed story" blogs, I have been inspired to create a blog with the true intention of the format: a simple web log of my inspirations as a writer and artist.

This blog is dedicated to Austin Kleon, whose book Steal Like an Artist, has been my primary inspiration.

In this book, Kleon discusses how all art is stolen in some way and a good artist knows what is worth stealing. As artists, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that everything we create is original. We all draw our inspiration from many sources and we steal little gems from each one to develop our own body of work. Kleon's book outlines simple practices to ensure that you keep your art alive; one being: SHARE YOUR WORK.

Thief Profile

Good thieves never reveal their identity... although, good thieves don't likely advertise their plunders to the rest of the world either.

Art Thief, aka AJ, keeps her home in Toronto, Canada; though work often pulls her to every corner of the globe.

AJ is a writer and teacher disguised as a mild mannered stage manager. She loves working in theatre and being able to surround herself with some of the best artists in the industry (while plotting to take over the world with her own work). As a stage manager, AJ is constantly immersed in all forms of art. Talk about inspiration overload! The number of stories and characters that fill each day is more than any writer could ask. The goal now: keep up!

AJ is working on a lot of projects in 2013, including: the first full length run of her play, Empty Boxes; and the launch of Homestead Theatre Project. Stay tuned in the Happenings section of this blog for details.